Reading Scoble’s blog about his departure from MS, I realize how pissy my ho-humming it in the previous post might seem.  Robert’s earnest integrity, his unselfconscious self-absorbtion, his position as avatar of tech bloggers everywhere - all point to a more serious and credible context for this “one man leaves corporate gig for a well funded job with a small company” story.  So for anybody who is heavy into Scobleism as a faith or a political practice, I can only apologize for my small and perhaps demeaning sense of the story.

As for Liz Lawley, I wish her nothing but the best!

Jon Husband, co-founder of Qumana, is one of those people who hangs out there in the world of the internecks doing great work and making me feel guilty for not having his energy and focus. A website, an effort of Jon’s that’s not getting enough of my attention, is Thermo[SAT]. A year or so ago David Weinberger made the general comment to all of us that he is not reading our blogs. I knew what he meant, and while of course I was pissed that he wasn’t hanging on my every word, that he wasn’t concerned about my cat or what I had for breakfast, I could dig it. There are scores and scores of blogs by brilliant and creative people making an effort to annotate their own lives online. Who has time for all of them? Besides Scoble, of course. I think my New Year’s resolution (on June 11th this year) will have to be to pay more attention to the Wirearchy blog and Thermo[SAT].

In the ho-hum department, Robert Scoble’s changing jobs. I took the long way around for this news… Scoble, I’ve heard, is a wonderful guy, but basically his auto-human-aggregator schtick never interested me much so I seldom visit his blog. So I was at Thermo[SAT] for the update on Net Neutrality, not satisfied with what Doc Searls had provided by way of reflection, and I saw that the highly selective Thermo[SAT] “blogliste” contains a link to Terry Heaton, so I clicked through and there was the news about Scoble. Clicking back to get the links for this post, I saw that Jon had already covered it, so okee dokee… Scoble is leaving Redmond and headed for the Bay Area. That’s nice, I guess. The bloggers and vloggers are tootling this news from the rooftops. This shift reminds me of that scene in that movie where the guy says,

Gozer the Traveller will come in one of the
pre-chosen forms.  During the rectification
of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a
very large and moving Torb.  Then of course
in the third reconciliation of the last of
the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new
form for him, that of a Sloar.  Many Shubs
and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in
the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell
you.

No offense Robert. Good luck!

Pixels tidily cast in lucite, pages served from somewhere deep in the bat-cave, Suck (”a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”), the once mighty webPub and meme-machine-’zine emerged this morning through clickage associated with a hunt for David Foster Wallace. Nick Maniatis’ Howling Fantods, an extended DFW bibliography, has the top Google rank for David Foster Wallace 2024, but just guess which little blog o’ mine stands second behind it.

When you drop the “2006″ qualifier, Listics falls to number 19 in the race for fame through critical appreciation or just mean spirited criticism of the Infinite Jester, a placement well above - I competitively must add - the notorious Languagehat who nitpicks DFW to death in a lengthy diatribe here. (Notice: any satiric intent inferred or imputed to any content on the Listics blog should consider first the profound and more recent influence of TOM Swift, and only then the marginally interesting stylings of the DEAN.)

Languagehat’s essay calls for a response, and respond I may. I have tucked away a draft post titled “The Reconstruction of David Foster Wallace.” I’ll work on that after I have finished my current, more critical blog-in-prog: “Soylent Diesel; an examination of alternatives for resolving the emergent petrochemical problem.”